Paul Durrenberger

Paul Durrenberger

Settled by Viking chieftains around 900, Iceland remained free from outside rule for 300 years. Tradition holds that this independent society was egalitarian, an "almost democracy" that flourished until Iceland was swallowed by the kingdom of Norway in 1262. Penn State anthropologist Paul Durrenberger, however, has a very different view of Iceland's Golden Age.

Around the year 1000, a woman named Gudrid sailed west from Greenland. She spent three winters in a land called Vinland, then sailed east to Iceland. Since the 1960s, archeologists have linked Gudrid's home in the New World with the Viking ruins at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.

Now a team working in Iceland believe they've found the longhouse Gudrid lived in when she returned from America.